Terry Galloway knows what it means to grow up without stability, safety or belonging. Now he wants Britain’s institutions to understand it too.
Terry sat down with our Foster Care magazine editor to share his experiences of growing up in care and his vision for a future where care-experienced people face fewer barriers and have greater opportunities to thrive.
Before our interview, Terry Galloway returned to one of the streets where he had lived as a child.
At the time, his mother was involved in one of Manchester's most infamous criminal gangs, and the children often found themselves caught up in the fallout.
“We used to live in this house in Harper Hay,” he says. “And because that gang was notorious for doing armed robberies, they’d turn up at our house with all the loot and empty all the money out onto the couch.”
Then, he says, the adults would hand the children money to get them out of the way.
“They’d give us a quid to basically get rid of the children, and there’s three of us,” he says. “So we’d go to the shop and split it.
“That’s the first time I learned a bit of maths - and about fairness, how to split a pound between three. And then obviously there’s a penny left, so we used to put the penny down the grid.”
The memory stayed with him for decades. So much so that, before the conference, Galloway went to Screwfix and bought equipment to try to dredge the same drain.
He never got the chance.
“When I got there that night, there was a truck parked right over it,” he says, grinning. “It probably saved me because I’d have got all sorts of diseases and stuff. But I might see if I can dredge up one of those pennies one day.”
Terry tells the story with a grin. But what lies behind it is much heavier: a childhood scarred by constant moves - through foster care, children's homes, temporary accommodation, hostels and periods at home with his mother, who struggled with addiction.
“One time we might be living in a hostel for domestic violence, then another time I might be in a hospital, another time it might be a squat,” he says. “My mum used to move around quite a lot.”
By his own estimate, he experienced around a hundred different moves growing up.
“You’re always adapting,” he says.
The instability became normal. Yet throughout it all, Galloway remained fiercely attached to his mother. By the age of 10, he was running away from children's homes to find her in Manchester.
“I’d be in a children’s home right on the other side of the city, and I’d literally run away and go and find my mum and she’d be in bed ill, withdrawing from heroin,” he says. “And then she’d give me a little note and I’d walk a mile to this house and score some heroin to take back to her.”
When he finally left care, aged 16, he moved into his own flat. But the pull of family chaos remained.
“What happens is you go through all this, you leave care and then you go back to your family and you’re back in all the chaos,” he says. “So there was 10 years of chaos really… until I got away.”
"You've got the brains and I've got the heart"
The turning point, was his sister Hazel.
Like Terry, Hazel had spent time in care as a child and struggled for years with trauma and abuse.
“She was addicted to alcohol by 13, 14,” he says quietly. “She used to self-harm. She was anorexic. So all the stuff that goes on now for some of these care leavers, she’d done most of that stuff.”
After attending the funeral of a mutual friend in Devon, the two sat talking together alone. Hazel was deeply unwell and frightened by the direction her life was taking.
“She was basically saying to me, ‘I don’t want to be next. I don’t want to die.’”
That night, Galloway searched desperately for something that might give her hope.
“All I could think was: let’s change the care system together,” he says. “We talked all night about what we could do. We could write books. We didn’t know nothing about politics at that time.”
At one point, Hazel turned to him and said:
“You’ve got the brains and I’ve got the heart.”
A few months later, Hazel was dead.
The campaign became a way of continuing that conversation. Not only for Hazel, but for the many care-experienced people who, Galloway says, have "left us prematurely."
Now 48, Galloway has become one of the leading voices behind a growing campaign to make care experience a protected characteristic under equality law – an attempt, he says, to force wider society to better understand the instability, trauma and disadvantage many care-experienced people continue to carry long into adulthood.
More than 100 councils across the UK have already adopted the principle locally, with campaigners hoping eventually to see it embedded in national law.
The barriers nobody sees
At the heart of the campaign is a simple argument: many care-experienced people enter adulthood carrying burdens and responsibilities that most institutions are simply not designed to recognise.
Systems that appear neutral, Galloway argues, are often built around assumptions of family support, stable housing and emotional security - assumptions many care leavers cannot rely on.
He points to universities that close down accommodation during holidays, assuming students have family homes to return to. He also talks about care-experienced young people moving repeatedly between temporary accommodation, often losing access to GPs, dentists and other support services as they do so.
Others move into social housing flats completely alone, without furniture, carpets, curtains or practical support.
“When kids leave care, all they want is the home that they never had,” Galloway says.
Without support, he argues, vulnerability can escalate quickly.
“They end up asking the wrong people for help and support,” he says. “And the gangs and the criminals can just see them a mile off that they’re vulnerable.”
For Galloway, these experiences reflect a wider failure to recognise how differently care-experienced young people enter adulthood.
He describes the issue through the language of stress and trauma. When a child falls over and hurts themselves, he says, a parent or caregiver usually helps regulate that distress through comfort and reassurance.
“So when they start to cry, they start to build up this stress in the body - cortisol,” he says. “But as soon as you give them love, it dissipates.”
For many children who experience abuse, neglect or instability, that regulation never consistently happens.
“So that cortisol, as it’s building up, it just stays there. And then the next event, and then the next event, and then it just builds up,” he says.
The problem, he argues, is that many care leavers then move into adult systems that continue to retraumatise them rather than support them.
“Every barrier retraumatises them again,” he says.
He pauses.
“And then that’s what causes disease. And that’s why we become alcoholics and addicted to drugs, obesity, all this stuff. And that’s why we live 20 years less than everybody else.”
None of this, Galloway insists, is inevitable.
Changing the system
The campaign to make care experience a protected characteristic is designed to change how institutions design services, develop policies and make decisions.
Under the Equality Act 2010, public bodies already carry out Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) to examine whether policies disadvantage groups with protected characteristics such as race, disability or sex. Campaigners argue that care experience should be considered in the same way.
Rather than reacting after harm has occurred, institutions would be expected to consider how policies might affect care-experienced people from the outset and whether those disadvantages could be reduced.
Galloway points to housing as one example.
A housing association carrying out an Equality Impact Assessment, he says, might begin by asking why care leavers are overrepresented in antisocial behaviour and eviction cases. Once staff start listening to care-experienced young people, they begin to understand how isolation, fractured family relationships and a lack of support can contribute to vulnerability and homelessness.
Once those vulnerabilities become visible, he argues, the response changes too.
Instead of responding only after crisis point, services could intervene earlier through mentoring, life-skills support and employment programmes.
“The point is not special treatment,” he says. “It’s making people think differently when they design systems.”
Some critics argue that recognising care experience as a protected characteristic could increase stigma or encourage people to define care-experienced young people through disadvantage.
Galloway disagrees.
“The Equality Act was created to reduce stigma,” he says. “And the beautiful thing about it is that, if it’s done properly, you won’t have to wave a flag and say, ‘I’m care experienced.’”
Instead, he argues, systems themselves would begin taking account of the realities many care-experienced people face from the outset.
“The system will just work for you because it would already have taken your needs into account,” he says.
He points to another example: a Department for Work and Pensions employment programme that currently requires young people to be unemployed for six months before they can access additional support.
Most young people, he says, still have parents to fall back on.
“Whereas kids from care are living on their own.”
For someone without family support, six months unemployed can have very different consequences.
“By the time they’re six months unemployed, they could be addicted to drugs.
“They could be dead.
“If they’d done an equality impact assessment properly, care leavers would receive that support from day one.”
For Galloway, though, the campaign is about far more than changing the law.
“It gives voice to care-experienced people,” he says.
Children’s social care professionals, he argues, already understand many of the realities care leavers face. But outside those systems - in housing, employment, healthcare, universities and public services - care experience often remains largely invisible.
“The purpose of this isn’t simply procedural,” he says. “It’s forcing people to hear the voice of care-experienced people and understand what’s actually happening.”
Belonging
Galloway often refers to Maslow's hierarchy of needs - a theory developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow which argues that people need safety, stability, love and belonging before they can reach their full potential.
“A lot of care leavers never get that sense of belonging,” he says. “That’s the missing bit.”
For him, the campaign is not simply about removing practical barriers, but about creating systems that stop pushing care-experienced people back into survival mode.
“So if we can fix things - if we can stop those barriers, stop retraumatising them through systems - these kids will jump to the next level,” he says. “And when they do jump to the next level, they’ll actually outperform their peers.”
When Galloway first began campaigning after the conversation with Hazel, he says, his focus was simply on helping care-experienced people.
“But the reality is it’s bigger than that now,” he says. “I’ve realised that if you fix it for the most vulnerable, you actually fix it for everybody.”
